Hands Off! Rally in West Side Park in Champaign, Illinois, Saturday, April 5th, 2025 (Photo by John Griswold)
Organizers are saying there were some 1,400 “Hands Off!” rallies nationwide Saturday, with three million participants protesting Donald Trump’s tariffs, Elon Musk’s dismantling of government agencies, and the general debasement of America’s standing in the world, among other issues.
The website of the organization 50501, which put the movement together, showed several rallies I could reach in this part of the Midwest—four in the St. Louis area and two more in Springfield and Champaign, Illinois.
The goal in St. Louis seemed to be the sum of people at various sites in St. Louis County and in Metro East, across the river, instead of gathered protestors at a single event for better visibility. (The website offered a link even at the last minute if you wanted to have your own event.) I had attended a first-wave 50501 rally in Springfield, the Illinois capital, two months earlier, so I decided to try Champaign this time, home to the University of Illinois’ flagship campus. The location has symbolic import in the national unrest.
To start with, Illinois governor JB Pritzker has positioned himself as a leading antagonist to Trump and to his second administration. At a speech at the 2024 DNC he said, “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” On February 19, 2025, he gave a state of the state speech that was noted across the country for its anti-Trump rhetoric.
“I know it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services,” Pritzker said. “They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research. […]
“My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America—and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. […] Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
Illinois went for Harris, 55 percent to Trump’s 44 percent, but only 14 of 102 counties were blue, and half of those were in Chicagoland. Even Sangamon County, which has the capital, is red. Outside Chicago, there have always been gripes about the city’s money and influence. Pritzker, it is often pointed out, grew up in California, and his family is based in Chicago. During the pandemic, Pritzker’s stay-at-home orders and mask mandate, following the Biden administration’s policies, were hugely unpopular “downstate” and brought Pritzker even more ridicule on right-wing media and social media.
A lot goes right in Illinois, which has the United States’s fifth-largest economy and third-largest city. But Trump has often made threats against Chicago, and many have wondered if the state will be the site of a showdown between left and right.
There were no incidents at the Hands Off! Rally in Champaign’s West Side Park. Sixty percent of Champaign County voted for Harris, though I suspect most of those voters were in the twin cities of Champaign-Urbana proper, where academics and like-minded people form a bloc of Democrat centrists, liberals, progressives, and some leftists. Maybe 400 people, many from the university, tried to listen to speakers who used an under-powered sound system. Then they marched the perimeter of the large park, holding protest signs and waving to cars honking in support.
“I guess we proved Champaign is blue,” said a guy on his second beer pulled from a pocket of his red Marlboro Country Store coat.
No one was protesting in downtown Champaign, with its popular restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. No MAGA believer showed up with an assault rifle, as someone did in Indiana, or with a Nazi flag, as a man did in St. Louis’s Metro East. Still, there are underlying tensions specific to the university.
Someone in the rally crowd who worked at the university told me of recent scams targeting international students, taking hundreds of thousands of their dollars. He implied the scams were a by-product of the hysteria over immigration in the Trump era. (“The University’s International Student and Scholar Services said on its website that international students are often targets for scammers due to their supposed lack of understanding about how certain systems in the U.S. work and the fear of arrest or deportation,” WCIA reported.) In the fall of 2024, UIUC had 12,500 international students enrolled from 125 countries.
The university employee also told me he was concerned that on March 19th, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to Dr. Timothy K. Killeen, President of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, titled, “On Transparency from Universities on National Security Risks Posed by Chinese Nationals in STEM Programs.” The letter demanded specific information on Chinese students and American researchers, as well as data of much wider scope, including “a country-by-country breakdown of applicants, admittances, and enrollments at your university.”
The employee verbally sketched a possible future conflict, in which Trump and Pritzker would go head-to-head over deportations–not from the city of Chicago, but at the university. He imagined members of the campus community resisting unidentified federal agents pulling people from classrooms or dorms; Trump sending reinforcements; growing protests and presidential rhetoric about an out-of-control left; armed citizens from red communities swarming in to “help”; and Pritzker using the Illinois National Guard and state police to keep them at bay.
Aspects of it do not seem far-fetched, and it is often said on social media that Trump is looking for a reason to declare martial law. This suspicion stems from an executive order that reads, “Within 90 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.” On the face of it, this would not apply directly to a real or concocted confrontation at, say, a campus in the Midwest. April 20 marks the end of those 90 days.
For their part, the organization 50501 has said they are just getting started. Their next National Day of Action is April 19th.
